"[A] guide to the history and development of law in the U.S. and the change from territory to statehood"--Back cover.

Explore the controversial legal history of the formation of the United States Prestatehood Legal Materials is your one-stop guide to the history and development of law in the U.S. and the change from territory to statehood. Unprecedented in its coverage of territorial government, this book identifies a wide range of available resources from each state to reveal the underlying legal principles that helped form the United States. In this unique publication, a state expert compiles each chapter using his or her own style, culminating in a diverse sourcebook that is interesting as well as informative. In Prestatehood Legal Materials, you will find bibliographies, references, and discussion on a varied list of source materials, including: state codes drafted by Congress county, state, and national archives journals and digests state and federal reports, citations, surveys, and studies books, manuscripts, papers, speeches, and theses town and city records and documents Web sites to help your search for more information and more Prestatehood Legal Materials provides you with brief overviews of state histories from colonization to acceptance into the United States. In this book, you will see how foreign countries controlled the laws of these territories and how these states eventually broke away to govern themselves. The text also covers the legal issues with Native Americans, inter-state and the Mexico and Canadian borders, and the development of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of state government. This guide focuses on materials that are readily available to historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and researchers. Resources that assist in locating not-so-easily accessible materials are also covered. Special sections focus on the legal resources of colonial New York City and Washington, DC—which is still technically in its prestatehood stage. Due to the enormity of this project, the editor of Prestatehood Legal Materials created a Web page where updates, corrections, additions and more will be posted.

The historiography of church-state relations in America and Europe remains a live cultural, religious, and political issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Even more, current political invocations of history illuminate the need for a thoroughly trans-Atlantic approach to the history of church-state relations in the modern West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the formative period for modern church-states relations we see vividly the complex interrelationship of developments from England, France, and America. Ever since, historians and political figures have compared the European and American efforts to discern the proper role of religion in government and government in religion. This work is an effort to illuminate that role or at the very least to bring to light the innumerable ways in which such roles were formed.

This book systematically investigates the capital punishment of girls and women in one jurisdiction in the United States over nearly four centuries. Using Connecticut as an essential case study, due to its long history as a colony and a state, this study is the first of its kind not only for New England but for the United States. The author uses rich archival sources to look critically at the gendered differential in the application of the death penalty from the seventeenth century until the abolition of capital punish-ment in Connecticut in 2012. In addition to analyzing cases of executions, this monograph offers an innovative focus on women and girls who escaped judicial execution with death sentences that were avoided, reversed, reprieved, or commuted. The book fully describes the impact of the rise and fall of witchcraft allegations during the last half of the seventeenth century, the clash between the deg-radation of slavery and Enlightenment ideals that was the provocation for the de facto end of female capital punishment in the New Republic, the introduction of two degrees of murder, which effectively provided an es-cape hatch from the gallows, and a detailed look at the unique case of Lydia Sherman, whose sentence to life in prison under the Connecticut murder statute of 1846 emphatically confirmed the unofficial state exemption of females from the gallows. Pivotal cases since 1900 are also examined. The book will attract attention from a broad audience interested in criminology, criminal justice, capital punishment, women’s studies, and legal history. Anti-death penalty advocates, law school activists, public defenders, capital punishment litigators, and jurists will also find the book useful. Winner of the Association for the Study of Connecticut History 2020 Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award for the best monograph on a significant aspect of Connecticut’s history published in a calendar year.

Women before the Bar is the first study to investigate changing patterns of women's participation in early American courts across a broad range of legal actions--including proceedings related to debt, divorce, illicit sex, rape, and slander. Weaving the stories of individual women together with systematic analysis of gendered litigation patterns, Cornelia Dayton argues that women's relation to the courtroom scene in early New England shifted from one of integration in the mid-seventeenth century to one of marginality by the eve of the Revolution. Using the court records of New Haven, which originally had the most Puritan-dominated legal regime of all the colonies, Dayton argues that Puritanism's insistence on godly behavior and communal modes of disputing initially created unusual opportunities for women's voices to be heard within the legal system. But women's presence in the courts declined significantly over time as Puritan beliefs lost their status as the organizing principles of society, as legal practice began to adhere more closely to English patriarchal models, as the economy became commercialized, and as middle-class families developed an ethic of privacy. By demonstrating that the early eighteenth century was a crucial locus of change in law, economy, and gender ideology, Dayton's findings argue for a reconceptualization of women's status in colonial New England and for a new periodization of women's history.